GRAN TORINO

At age 78, Clint Eastwood has had a legendary run as an actor. Gran Torino is Eastwood's last film as an actor, so I hear. If it's true, then Gran Torino not a bad farewell at all.

The story is about a retired auto worker, Walt Kowalski, an everyman who's frame of reference is comfortably stuck in the mid 1950s. He's the ultimate grumpy old man, a widower, a racist, a gun (lots of them) owner, and he is less than close with his two sons and grandchildren. However, he has rock-solid sense of himself and what manhood means, and he carries a heavy burden of guilt from the Korean War.

He encounters his neighbors, a Hmong teenager named Thano (who tried to steal his Gran Torino car) and his sister, after intervening when a gang assaults them on his front lawn (part of a man's castle of course). After a rocky start, a kind of mentor relationship develops between Kowalski and Thano, whom he calls "Toad". He gives the young Thano a few of the rites of passage that all young men seek from their fathers or father figures. By the time the gang situation becomes very dangerous he is committed to Thano's future, and only sees one way out for him.

This is a film about human connections that succeed against great odds, as they sometimes do. It's a story worth hearing.